With the recent revelations of mass United States government surveillance, existing Internet governance arrangements have become more than untenable – for many they have become an outrage. And the solutions that governments proposed at WSIS – the IGF and the unfinished process towards enhanced cooperation – have not provided the substantial changes that stakeholders, particularly from the developing world, are now demanding. The speech that President Dilma Rousseff delivered to the 68th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on 24 September set the scene for change, describing her anger at the “grave violation of human rights and civil liberties” represented by the US surveillance revelations:

It affects the
international community itself and demands a response from it.
Information and communications technologies cannot be the new
battlefield between States. Time is ripe to create the conditions to
prevent cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war, through
espionage, sabotage, and attacks against systems and infrastructure
of other countries. …

For this reason,
Brazil will present proposals for the establishment of a civilian
multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and
to ensure the protection of data that travels through the web.

Following Rousseff's speech, most of
the I* organisations came together to meet in Uruguay. The outcome
of that meeting marked a radical break from their previous support
for the continuation of US oversight over Internet governance, and
their rejection of previous proposals for new models of public policy
development for the Internet. The Montevideo
Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation that they issued
on 7 October records that they “discussed the clear need to
continually strengthen and evolve [Internet governance] mechanisms,
in truly substantial ways”, and “agreed to catalyze
community-wide efforts towards the evolution of global
multistakeholder Internet cooperation” including “the
globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in
which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an
equal footing”.

But as radical a development as this
was, the tumult had barely begun. On 9 October, Fadi Chehadé, the
CEO of ICANN, dropped a bombshell with the announcement that, during
a hastily-convened meeting that day, he had convinced President Dilma
Rousseff to convene a multi-stakeholder
summit on Internet governance in April 2014, which would address
the issues raised in her speech and in the Montevideo Statement.

The summit would not be a UN meeting
(such as the IGF, and a tenth-anniversary WSIS meeting already
planned for the same month in Sharm
el Sheikh). Also unlike those meetings, it would have a mandate
to produce tangible outputs: a set of principles (Rouseff's “civilian
multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet”),
a proposed new institutional framework for Internet governance that
could substitute for the US oversight of ICANN, along with a
decision-making mechanism for “orphan issues” (those not being
dealt with in any other international forum).

The timing of this proposed summit
was no less extraordinary than its mandate: for governments, planning
a high-level summit in six months' time is like planning your wedding
for next week. The date chosen (which has subsequently been revised
to May) falls immediately after the main WSIS+10 meeting, but before
a follow-up high-level meeting that Brazil has been pushing for, that
could be used to ratify the decisions taken at the Brazil summit. It
would also precede the ITU Plenipotentiary in October, at which moves
for governmental control of the Internet could be reasserted, if
insufficient progress were made at the summit. And probably not
coincidentally, it also leads into the re-election date of President
Rousseff, also in October 2014.

The dust from this announcement had
barely settled before all the stakeholder groups involved in Internet
governance discussions were together in Bali to take stock of it, at
the 8th Internet Governance Forum, which wound up yesterday.
By then, accounts of the meeting from Brazil and ICANN were
beginning to diverge: was it a “summit”, as Brazil termed it, or
merely a “meeting” or “conference”, as contended by Chehadé?
Would it propose solutions, as Brazil insisted, or would it just be
for discussion, as Chehadé now described? Was the idea that the
summit should be multi-stakeholder a concession that Chehadé wrought
from the President, or did she have that notion all along?

Part of the reason for the divergence
was that Chehadé had not discussed his remarkable proposal to
President Rousseff with the other I* organisations before making it,
and had caught them quite by surprise. This was evident at a series
of tense and packed meetings during the week at which the proposal
was further explained to stakeholders. In particular, a meeting
called by the I* organisations on 23 October, that was chaired not by
Chehadé but by Chris Disspain, CEO of Australia's domain name
authority AuDA, painted a very different picture to that described by
Rousseff and Chehadé.

Disspain asserted that until now the
multi-stakeholder Internet governance system had been maintained by
the United States and a “quiet coalition of the willing”, and
warned of the risk that more Internet governance issues would “fall
into the hands of governments”. He announced plans to build a
coalition of thought leaders to oppose such moves towards a
“governmental or government-centric” model, and to spearhead a
grassroots campaign to build support for this position.

Downplaying the importance of the
summit, Disspain described it as “not the end game, just a stop on
the road”, and asserted that “we seem to have the reins of that
meeting, and we need to keep hold of those reins”. Even Chehadé,
whilst clearly having a broader conception of the summit's purpose
than Disspain, similarly boasted about the technical community's
leadership of the event, saying “we can make it our meeting”, and
claiming that that he had told the Brazilians that the meeting would
not be about proposing solutions, as this would be taking things too
fast.

This did not go down well for some in
the room, particularly from civil society, who saw in the summit a
potential way to address the serious human rights violations
committed through mass surveillance, and to accelerate the
long-delayed globalisation of oversight of ICANN and its functions.
They were alarmed by the prospect of the summit being hijacked to
serve the narrow interests of the Internet technical community, which
had been so quick to obstruct previous proposals for reforms to
Internet governance, such as through the IGF and enhanced cooperation
processes.

As the IGF closed yesterday, a small group of hastily-nominated stakeholder
representatives met that day to discuss the way forward. The
technical community and private sector nominees expressed little
enthusiasm for the summit at all, and seemed more interested in the
new coalition that that the technical community had announced to
oppose governmental involvement in Internet governance.

But Chehadé had released a genie
that could not be returned to its bottle. The delegation from
Brazil, whilst taken just as much by surprise by the
rapidly-unfolding summit plans as everyone else had been, had seized
the moment, along with much of the limelight at the 8th
IGF. Whilst details remained sketchy – they had no clear plan for
consulting with stakeholders, for example – they had promised to
release a more detailed plan of the summit by 11 November, and
meanwhile were also recruiting 3-4 other countries as co-hosts of the
summit. At the top of their list was Germany, in the wake of
revelations that the United States may have tapped
Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone. India, South Korea and
Australia are also possible candidates.

In only a month since President
Rousseff's speech to the United Nations so much has changed, and yet
at the same time so little. Whilst taking tentative steps forward
with the Montevideo statement, the technical community has already
begun to retreat from its full implications, in the fear of their
role being overshadowed. If the old guard of the technical community
have their way, another orchestrated WCIT-style
“grassroots” campaign against Internet governance reforms may be
in the offing.

But as the only clear driver for
concrete reform in the ten years since WSIS, the proposed summit has
also excited and energised other stakeholders, who see such change as
inevitable and overdue, and who regard Brazil as a more trustworthy
country than Cuba,
Russia, Iran or China to lead this effort using an inclusive,
multi-stakeholder process. It would be a shame to allow that
opportunity to slip by, all for the sake of preserving a model of
Internet governance that many now agree has become outdated and
inadequate for the Internet of today.